INTERVIEW: New Carter exhibition explores legacy of Karl Struss
Photo: Karl Struss (1886–1981), Agnes Ayres, Forbidden Fruit (1921), gelatin silver print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P1983.23.641.
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, recently opened its latest exhibition, an exposé on the photographer and cinematographer Karl Struss. The show — called Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood — continues through Aug. 25 and features many pieces from the Carter’s Struss Artist Archive.
For the unbeknownst, Struss was a well-respected photographer in the early part of the 20th century in New York City and then moved to sunny California to test out his abilities in this new phenomenon called moving pictures. He quickly ascended through the ranks of this burgeoning industry, amassing almost too many credits to count. And he never stopped, building a multi-decade career as an in-demand cinematographer who was able to bring a director’s vision to life with intricate, well-thought-out camerawork and artistic techniques that stood him out from the pack.
Struss’ credits include the 1925 version of Ben-Hur, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin. His output continued into more genre fare later in his career, including The Fly with Vincent Price, Rocketship X-M with Lloyd Bridges and Journey Into Fear with Orson Welles. Several of the pieces in the exhibition highlight this unique cinematic career, including images of Gloria Swanson in Something to Think About and Male and Female, plus Agnes Ayres in Forbidden Fruit.
The curators for the Struss exhibition are Jon Frembling, head archivist and Gentling curator, and Kristen Gaylord, former associate curator of photography at the Carter.
“Curators, as we both are, are responsible for coming up with exhibition ideas and proposing them and going through a process, and basically John and I were told by our boss that we had separately both been interested in Struss,” Gaylord said in a recent phone interview. “So, we had each been thinking about what kind of shows we wanted to do. And I wanted to do something on Struss, and so did he. And so we ended up having a conversation and saying, ‘Let’s do this together.’ We have different areas of expertise. We’re responsible for different areas of the collection. The story can be told more fully by combining those backgrounds and those roles.”
Frembling elaborated that the museum is the holder of the Struss archive, which includes the artist’s papers and photographic work. In his role as archivist, he works with this material often — material that allows the Carter to do a “deep dive” into the entirety of Struss’ career.
“It’s not just a pretty picture,” he said. “There’s a story there that really can be fleshed out with this deeper material. … We’re fortunate that over the years the museum has worked with many artists during their lifetimes to show their work as well as promote their careers. … Now, Struss is not someone we worked with during his lifetime, but we have a reputation in the field as a repository that does deep dives using archival materials.”
Apparently, the Struss estate was interested in the Carter because of the museum’s previous success with photographic work and promoting the full-sum of an artist’s output and biography, Frembling said. “And so first the gallery that represented Struss approached us with papers, and we purchased those,” he said. “Once we had acquired those from the gallery, then the family came and deposited a very large second set of stuff that was a gift, and so this is a really nice example of both a purchase and a gift recognizing what we do. We bought it because we really believe in Struss, and they gifted us stuff because they believe in what we’re doing. So it’s that’s really lovely pairing.”
Gaylord said there are not too many museums that collect the full archives of an artist’s work; that’s more the domain of research universities. After all, the complete output of an artist represents a lot of material, and in order to understand its complexity and context, there’s much needed staff expertise as well.
“The Carter is quite unusual for being a mid-size museum who collects in-depth like this because for a single photographer there might be thousands of photographs, thousands of negatives, which require different storage situations, different handling situations, and then tens of thousands, if not more, of objects in the archive,” she said. “So, it’s really special that this museum does that, and as Jon alluded to, it does mean that when we’re looking at an artist, we’re looking at them really three-dimensionally, which is a funny thing to say in a show about cinematography. But we’re looking at them very three-dimensionally from all these different facets, and that’s really something that the Carter is particularly good at.”
Gaylord said there have only been two other major exhibitions about Struss, and one of them, back in the 1990s, was hosted by the Carter. That one, some 30 years ago, had the subtitle From New York to Hollywood, and its main focus was on the early material from Struss’ career. For example, in the exhibition catalogue there were two essays on the photographer / cinematographer’s rise to fame and his fine-art work in New York City.
“We decided in this show to focus on things that hadn’t been brought to life, that our visitors hadn’t seen, that the field hadn’t seen,” Gaylord said. “Photography plays a role, but there’s also video. There are artifacts from movies he did, like posters and Playbills. It really is focused on that time in California with just his early work as a backdrop because it’s part of the astounding nature of how he could be so good at this one thing and then go on to be so good at this other thing, but it also provides context for the skill sets he developed and he brought with him to California.”
Struss’ career is an interesting one because he transitions from the fine-art world to the commercial side of the business, and that jump can sometimes have critics rolling their eyes or passing judgment on selling out. Not so for Gaylord and Frembling.
“I think there are people who would look down on the work he did after he moved to California, but we aren’t two of them,” Gaylord said. “I think the field in general has shifted a lot. There still is sometimes a separation between commercial work and fine-art work, but one of the things I’ve always loved about Struss is that he was much more democratic than that. Even when he was working in New York and making these award-winning photographs for fine-art photographers, he operated a studio for a couple of years. He developed a lens. He did commercial work. He did advertising and portrait work, so he was always making money in the ways that photographers do. And I think that makes it a very natural transition to the early journeyman work he had to do getting his foothold in California.”
Frembling added: “He’s someone who is able to hold down a full-time job while going to school and producing fine-art photography. He takes this amazing work ethic with him to Hollywood in a transition, and he recognizes that this is an opportunity to break into a fairly new field of endeavor. And he really applies himself. He hits the ground running. We have copious correspondence home to his mother. He writes home to Mom constantly, describing, ‘Hey, I went and pounded the pavement to find a job. I landed this job. I networked with these people. I’m doing all these things.’ Of course, it pays dividends fairly quickly. He has to put a lot of work into it, but he’s someone who does. That gets him his first journeyman jobs … doing still photography, publicity photography for posters and promotional materials, but he’s someone who clearly has a talent and an eye. And it’s recognized within a short time. It doesn’t take long for him to be put behind this second or third-unit cameras on a film to start working in moving pictures. That biographical drive is something that comes through in his work. He never stops working. He has an incredibly long career in Hollywood because he’s always doing something and usually multiple somethings at the same time.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood continues through Aug. 25 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Click here for more information.
